This Is What Your Brain Looks Like On LSD

Science just answered a question many of us have been curious about: What does the human brain look like on drugs? Though the answer definitely varies from drug-to-drug, a group of London scientists decided to zero in on one in particular—LSD—and the results are actually kind of pretty.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as "acid" or "LSD," falls into a group of drugs called hallucinogens. These drugs are known to alter a person's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings—causing hallucinations and other sensations.

Researchers at Imperial College London wondered how a hallucinogen like acid would affect someone internally, so they used an fMRI (a scanner that translates neurological activity into images) to get visuals on the changes in brain activity. Twenty healthy adults—all of whom had previous experience with psychedelic drugs like LSD—volunteered for the study. Some were given acid, and others were given a placebo—allowing researchers to easily compare a standard brain to a brain on LSD.

"Under normal conditions, information from our eyes is processed in a part of the brain at the back of the head called the visual cortex," the researchers wrote. "However, when the volunteers took LSD, many additional brain areas—not just the visual cortex —contributed to visual processing." This caused the neurological images of the people who took LSD to light up in a number of areas. These visuals were more dominated by color than those from the people in the control group, whose brain activity was more focused in one area. "Our brains become more constrained and compartmentalized as we develop from infancy into adulthood, and we may become more focused and rigid in our thinking as we mature," one of the scientists wrote. "In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained. This also makes sense when we consider the hyper-emotional and imaginative nature of an infant's mind."

So there you have it. The human brain on LSD looks a lot more colorful than a standard human brain, thanks to acid's capacity to make someone think and perceive more freely. Who would've thought a drug could make neurological scans so pretty?